Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to
another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to take a look at a rifle that caused a serious paradigm shift in military small arms. This is the Model of 1886 French Lebel rifle, and what makes it special is the fact that it was the first military rifle to use smokeless powder. Now smokeless powder has a tremendous advantage over black powder, actually it has several. At the very basic end, smokeless powder doesn't create a giant cloud of smoke, as the name sort of implies. This means that battlefields remain clear, you can still see in ways that large groups of soldiers firing black powder rifles couldn't. With black powder rifles in large groups, that smoke just obscures the whole battlefield. But more significantly than that, smokeless powder allowed a projectile to be thrown at a far higher velocity than black powder did. This allowed bullet diameters to be reduced, bullet velocities to be greatly increased, and the effective range of small arms basically doubled overnight. Now smokeless powder had been ... people
knew that smokeless powder was out there. This wasn't a revolutionary development,
it was an iterative development. So lots of different people had been working
towards it, and a Frenchman by the name of Paul Vielle was the first to actually come up
with a workable chemical solution to this problem, and he did that in 1884. Now it would remain
a closely guarded French state secret as long as possible, but that didn't last very long. This is one of those developments where ...
basically any real competent chemist could observe ... if they had a sample of Vielle's "Poudre B", Powder B, or Blanche,
white powder as opposed to black powder, if they had a sample of it they could
reverse-engineer it fairly quickly. And so it would only be a couple years before basically the
whole world ... had access to smokeless powder. The French tried to contain it, contain the
knowledge, but that was kind of a hopeless task. At any rate, when this was developed the
French military decided that it was going to go all out and exploit this new advantage that they had. So at this time ... the French army
was primarily using the 1874 Gras rifle. This was a single shot, black powder, 11mm rifle.
The French Navy however had skipped ahead. The Navy had gone from the Chassepot,
which was a needle fire rifle, to a tube fed ... basically a version of the Kropatschek in
11mm Gras. Now I have a Kropatschek rifle here, and what makes the Kropatschek special is
that it has a tube magazine under the barrel. Now tube magazines under the barrel
weren't exactly a novel feature at this point, these go all the way back to the 1850s and 60s. But the Kropatschek had a specific mechanism
for it that worked pretty well, and a nice elevator. It worked for long cartridges in a way that, like, the
Henry tubular magazine system wasn't quite so efficient. At any rate, the French Navy had
adopted one of those rifles in 1878, and by 1884 the French army
was also looking at adopting them, so they were starting to build the Model of 1884, basically a Gras bolt with a Kropatschek tube magazine. Now I'm telling you this to set up
where the Lebel actually comes from. In 1884 and '85 when this smokeless
powder was developed, the French ordnance took some time and started doing
experiments on smaller diameter bullets. They experimented with 7mm and 7.5mm and
8mm bullets, and they were able to take their time and do it well. And they came to the
conclusion that the best, the optimum, diameter to use for this new propellant would be 8mm. Then they started looking into what action to use,
they knew that a new rifle was going to come of this, obviously. And so they started looking into ...
what were the best options out there. In particular they looked at the Mannlicher
system, and they also took a serious look at the Remington-Lee system. Now the Remington-Lee
would go on to be adopted by the British as the Lee-Enfield and the French were looking
at this pretty closely, the Ordnance Department was. Until January of 1886, and at that point a new
War Minister is appointed by the government, General Boulanger, and he takes a
look at this new technology and demands ... he wants the new rifle on his desk in 5 months.
He wants it on his desk in May of 1886. And this really throws a gigantic wrench
into the plans that had been ongoing on how to build the best rifle to exploit this new powder. All of a sudden it's not the best rifle,
it's what on earth can we possibly have functional and developed by May. And it's January now. And what this means, fortunately they'd
already had the time to do a good job on finding a bullet diameter, so that's out of the way. But they don't have a cartridge, and they
don't have a rifle lined up. And with only five months to work there's no way
that they're going to be able to develop a brand new system on any of these existing actions. So what they have to do is look at what do they
already have in the French military arsenal, and there's only one magazine-fed rifle that the
French military has, and that's this Kropatschek. The 1878 Navy and the 1884/1885
(they were kind of tweaking it) Army rifle. So there we go, that's the solution.
They took the French Kropatschek and adapted it to the new smokeless powder,
which required a few changes. So first off they also had to develop a new cartridge.
How are we gonna ... what are we going to put this 8mm bullet into? And
the answer there was, again, the only way to do this in the allotted time
frame was to take the existing 11mm Gras and basically just neck it down to 8mm. This resulted in a kind of a unique double tapered cartridge. This would turn out to be one of the
fundamental flaws of the entire system. This cartridge would handicap the French
for decades, but it was the only thing that they could actually get done in the
timeframe that the government had allowed. So ... it was actually quite remarkable
that the Lebel was able to be developed in this 5 or 6 month period. There are a lot
of different officers who worked together to make the whole project come together.
Colonel Lebel, whose name ended up on the rifle, actually his contribution was designing
the bullet itself, the jacket and the shape, that was his contribution. There were other
folks who did the other things that were necessary, changing the sights, changing the barrel, changing
the tube magazine a little bit as necessary. The most substantial change necessary to the
system was to give it a brand new bolt head, because the original Kropatschek and
the French versions in ... 11mm Gras locked just on the bolt handle of the rifle. They
were low-pressure black powder cartridges and that was fine. With the new smokeless powder ... the new smokeless powder developed much
higher pressures and it required a much stronger locking system, so the most
substantial change between the Kropatschek and the Lebel was the development
of a two lug ... locking bolt head adapted onto the existing Gras bolt. So they
put all this together, May of 1886 rolls around and impressively they actually have a rifle and
ammunition, the whole system ready and complete. And so this rifle starts to undergo testing and it's ... actually goes through testing really quite quickly for a new, well a fundamentally new type of small arm. And by April of 1887 it's been formally
adopted and they're ready to put it into production. This thing met or exceeded all of the
military expectations of it. Substantially. This was a fantastic ... it really was a
game-changing rifle at that point in history. Because ... this thing has sights out to
over 2,000 metres, which was just literally unheard of with every other military rifle in the world. The range at which you could deliver
accurate fire with the new smokeless powder in the Lebel rifle was phenomenal. ... And penetration was phenomenal. Because
this was a small diameter, jacketed bullet traveling at high velocity it would
go through wood, dirt, armour far better than anything else anybody had at the time. So, rifle's great, does exactly what we want,
they ... go to put it into production and all three major ... French state arsenals
are tasked with producing the Lebel. They actually contract for machine tools in
the United States to set up production lines, serious high efficiency, high
volume production lines for this rifle. This would be ... a serious element of this
involved mechanical interchangeable parts, which hadn't really been so much of a
thing with the Gras but in order to produce Lebel rifles in the volume and the time
that they had anticipated, these rifles had to be on the cutting edge of modern
technology as far as manufacturing goes. You had to be able to just have a bin of every part and
assemble rifles without having to do any hand fitting. So all three arsenals are set up to do this. The arsenals end up working ... they are running
six days a week full shifts and half shifts on Sunday. And within six years, by the end of 1892,
they produced 2.8 million Lebel rifles. They basically completely re-equipped the entire
French Army with this fundamentally new rifle. And that was basically why Boulanger
had forced such a rapid development. He wanted the French Army to actually be
able to use ... to have this advantage in hand and available. What he didn't want to do
was take this new smokeless powder and take a long time developing a rifle,
and then, you know, start making it slowly, and so maybe it only equips elite units,
and well what if a war happens then? We can't really exploit this new advantage
and other people will catch up to us. In this way, the French Army was able to take that
advantage and have it fully in hand very quickly. The downside of course is everyone else did
catch up. And the people who were busy catching up to ... the French smokeless
powder rifle, they spent more time and came up with better systems.
Primarily the magazine system. The tube magazine on this rifle is slow
to load, it's kind of awkward and clumsy, it's complicated, it's expensive to make, and ... Well, it does hold a lot of cartridges. It
holds eight plus one plus a second one, sort of, we'll get to that in a minute.
Well it does hold 8 compared to 5 rounds for virtually everything else that was out there. The complexity of the magazine and the time
it takes to reload really hinder that advantage. And it would only be literally 2 or 3 years
before Mauser has developed the stripper clip. The Belgians in 1889 adopt a smokeless powder
Mauser action rifle that uses stripper clips and has a double stacked internal box magazine
that was far superior to the Lebel's magazine. Everyone else would catch up, and
they would do it with better magazines, and they would do it with better cartridges.
The Mauser cartridges, the 7mm, the 7.65, the 8mm Mauser, these
are all rimless basically straight wall, necked cartridges that are far
easier to fit into box magazines than this double tapered, heavy
rimmed French Lebel cartridge. So by 1892 basically the whole army
is equipped with these and production pretty much, it doesn't shut down,
but it basically tapers off dramatically. They continue making some rifles
for a few more years, but basically this was a matter of we need the Army
to have these so we'll build all of them, and then the Army has them and
then we don't need to build more. When World War One began, this was the
standard infantry rifle for the French military. And they actually didn't bother ... they didn't
put it back into production during World War One. They looked at it and by this point it was
clearly obsolescent. All of the various other developments, the British with the Lee,
the Germans with the Mauser, even things like the Krag-Jorgensen rifles are
definitely better designs than the Lebel. And so the French went looking for
something that they could produce quickly and efficiently and inexpensively
during World War One. And what they came up with was adopting the
Berthier carbines into a new infantry rifle. I have a whole series of videos on the
Berthiers. If you're interested in those,
definitely check out the other videos. But the Berthier had initially existed because a tube
magazine gun isn't really ideal for turning into a carbine. Because the shorter you make the barrel
the smaller the magazine capacity gets. That's all I'll say about that. We cover
that pretty well in the Berthier videos. At any rate, these guns ... only the Tulle
Arsenal does any new production of Lebels during World War One.
And ... it's a little unclear exactly, but that's done primarily from
existing stockpiles of spare parts. They may have built some entirely new
firearms, but the documentation just simply doesn't exist anymore, and we're
not sure about it. They do absolutely maintain and repair and rebuild Lebel
rifles that are damaged during World War One. And in fact the French would be
re-barrelling Lebels clear until the 1930s. So the the rifle was formally ... determined
to be ... formally declared obsolete in 1920. At that point they're not going to
be putting together any new ones, although they do continue to support
the system from there onward. So ... that's quite a lot of background. But let's take a look at the actual action
here, because this is fairly distinctive from most other bolt-action rifles
that you may be familiar with. We'll begin with some markings on the outside. Something important to recognise is
that with French rifles the receiver was not really a particularly heavily controlled part. So
the receiver will be marked with the manufacturing facility and the model of the weapon, but the
receiver actually doesn't have a serial number on it. It just wasn't considered a serialised part
by the French. So in this case we have "Manufacture d'armes St Étienne". This is
one of the three main arsenals, the others would be Tulle and Châtellerault. You'll find
Lebels with those markings on the receivers as well. And then this is a Modèle 1886 M93. Now well,
I'll come back to the M93 in a moment, but basically there were a series of
production upgrades that were made over the six years of rapid production. The rifles would come back, and they would all be updated in a few minor
ways to meet a new specification. So we'll get to that in a moment. On the barrel you'll find the serial number,
and the French system here was to use a letter prefix and then blocks of 100,000
rifles. So each of the three arsenals was given a batch of serial number prefixes to use,
and if they ran out of them they double back. So Châtellerault, for example, had ... A, B, C, D and E. Once they finished with E they would go back
and they would have a double prefix series of AB and then they would have AC
and so on. Now this particular one is N, and these letters are in this distinctively
French scripted font that are sometimes a little tricky to read. And then this is 85,000.
So once they hit 99,999 on this, on the N series, they would go to the P
series. They skipped O and they skipped I. Anyway, also on the barrel you'll have the initials
of the company that supplied the steel for the barrels. And then you have two inspector's initials
here, one of those is the factory director and one is the chief arms inspector, who are responsible for the quality of all the weapons coming out of the factory. On the opposite side, the right side of the
barrel, we have one other useful marking. This is Manufacture d'Armes, and then a
single initial for the factory, so this will be an S, generally, (an S, a T, or a C,
for Saint-Étienne, Châtellerault or Tulle). This is a Saint-Étienne manufactured gun, has a Saint-Étienne barrel, and then the date that the barrel was
actually manufactured which is 1890. The serial number is going to be marked in several other places on the rifle. We have it on the bottom of the magazine
system here, we have it on the handguard, we have it on the bolt stem, the bolt handle there. And we have it on the left side of the
buttstock. So this is a pretty cool example which is completely all matching and original,
it hasn't been re-barrelled since 1890. One other marking you'll find on these is a roundel
stamped on the right side of the buttstock, and they will often be found quite worn like this one. If the stock was replaced on the rifle at some
point during its service, replacement stocks did not get these stamps, so there won't
always be one. But often, because this was a fairly light stamp in most cases, often they're just worn away. And this one's almost illegible. What
this says is MA in the centre, which is the official army stamp
of approval and ownership. So this is put on the rifle when it's actually
physically taken into military service. Which isn't necessarily exactly the same
time as when the barrel might have been manufactured, for example. Sometimes barrels
sat around for a while before they were used. Anyway, on the top of this circular stamp,
you will read the month that the weapon was accepted and on this one it's ... I don't
know, I think that's totally illegible at this point. On the very bottom you'll have the year
that it was accepted and this one is, because I know the barrel date is 1890,
we can make out that this was 1890, but boy, that's almost completely gone as well. And then there will be a letter on this
side for the arsenal and then a couple of our controller and factory inspector initials as well. So just for comparison's sake
here's a very late barrel example. We know that the rifle was
declared obsolete in 1920, however they did continue to service and re-barrel
worn-out examples until World War Two. So, this one has a T, meaning that this barrel was made at the Tulle Arsenal and the barrel was made in 1936. It also has this N mark on the top of the
chamber, that indicates that the barrel has been ... the throat has been recut for the
1932 Ball N, what's called Ball N. Basically, they redesigned the 8mm Lebel
ammunition to be best suited for heavy machine guns. If you're interested in the development
of ammo, I also have a separate video
on that that you can take a look at. Anyway, our original 1890 rifle
does not have that N marking and this later re-barrel does, because this was
an upgrade that was made in the early 1930s. Also, I should point out that on this
one we have a T marked barrel, so Tulle, on a rifle that was manufactured at Saint-Étienne,
kind of worn away here on this side, but the reason that these mismatch is
because this receiver would have been made almost certainly in the ... late 1880s or
early 1890s and then it was re-barrelled later on, so the original barrel would
have been a Saint-Étienne barrel. OK, now the action. How does this thing actually work? Well the first question is how is it that
you have a tube magazine with a pointed spitzer bullet and not have the thing
actually detonate in the magazine tube when one bullet tip hits the primer
(by the way, these are all dummy cartridges). How come that doesn't happen
and the rifle doesn't go kaboom? Well there are two explanations.
The first is when this was first developed it actually used a ... flat fronted,
round nosed sort of bullet and so that wasn't an issue. Later,
when they adopted a spitzer projectile they actually cut a groove in the rim of the base
of the cartridge, so there's a groove right here, that captures the tip of one bullet
into this safe rim, the safe channel, around the base of the cartridge in
front of it. Now in addition to this, Because of the serious taper of the
cartridges, when you lay these flat, like they would be laying in the magazine tube, the tip of the bullet actually isn't pointing at
all at the centre of the cartridge in front of it. It's pointing down at the edge of the rim. So that's why the tube magazine isn't a
problem with the spitzer ammunition. Now loading this is a little bit unusual. Open the bolt first, and I just do this gently, and you can see we have an elevator mechanism here. What actually ... when I want to feed a cartridge, there's a cartridge sitting in the elevator, and I have to lift it up so it gets pushed into the chamber. The way that happens is by emphatically cycling the bolt. And the bottom locking lug on the
bolt head actually strikes a lever in here that pops the elevator up like that. Then when you close the bolt, the stem of the bolt handle right there, hits this lever, which pushes the elevator back down. So now it's in the downward position again. This is the heart of the Kropatschek
system that allows you to have a tube magazine with a really quite long rifle cartridge. This works a lot better than the elevator
mechanism from other tube fed rifles. Some of the American rifles had
experimented with tube magazines in the back end of the stock, that didn't work as well. Anyway, this is the system that the French would use. Now there's a little detent down
in there that you really can't see that catches on the rim of a cartridge,
so that only one cartridge gets spat out onto this elevator per cycling of the bolt. In order to load this what we're going to do is just push cartridges in one at a time ... like so. There's no clip, ... there is no shortcut for this. And in total we can hold eight cartridges in this tube magazine. It runs inside the handguard all the
way out to ... the end of the rifle. By the way, that's why there's no cleaning rod
in this rifle because there's a tube magazine sitting inside the stock that prevents you
from having the space to put in a cleaning rod. Now for shooters today, what you can
also do is take one extra round and just lay it (the easiest way to do it is like that),
you can just lay one additional round on that elevator mechanism, and then close the action. Presto, you've got ... now you've got eight plus one. Now, if you want to be super cool, you can also take
a second extra round, slide it into the chamber, ... chamber that round, close the bolt. And now you've got eight plus one plus a second one, so a total of ten rounds of capacity.
Now the way that the French ... the French standard for doing this, the
manual of arms for the French military, was to load eight in the tube and then
cycle the bolt, and then you're done. They would never have carried it with a 10th
round in it because this thing is cocked. There's no way to have a 10th round
in there without this being cocked, and the Lebel has no manual safety.
This is a holdover from the days of the Gras when you only loaded the rifle when
you were commanded to by an officer. Basically when ... firing was imminent. They carried that over to the Lebel and the Berthier, both, you would only chamber a round when you were commanded to, so that you were almost immediately ready to fire. So there is no manual safety. You'd never carry
this thing around chambered with the striker cocked. In addition, French doctrine did not have them
carrying an extra round in the elevator. There's not really a particular reason not to. And in fact after you're done firing
this is the condition that the rifle will be in. However, the original manual just says load 8 in the tube and then close the bolt and then cycle it once. And ammunition was issued in 8 round packets, so. Now some people have seen depictions of the Lebel
in video games or seen video of people shooting them, and there is this weird double charging
thing that you have to do to actually fire the rifle. So here's how that would go. We're gonna load the magazine fully (there we go). We'll just pretend that that's fully loaded in there. Now in order to actually chamber a round
from this point I have to close the bolt. Fine. Now I have to open the bolt and I have to end up with a round
on this elevator, so the first thing I'm going to do is open the bolt with
some alacrity to pop the elevator up. Now I close it a second time and you can hear a secondary click, because now a cartridge has popped out onto the elevator. So I can open the bolt a second time, again with some alacrity. Now when I chamber ... when I close the
bolt the second time a round is chambered. And again you hear this click,
when the bolt goes all the way down it drops the elevator, releases a cartridge. Now we've got one in the chamber, one in the elevator and 6 or however many others have been loaded in the
magazine tube. And now you can begin firing. Every time you do, when you open
the bolt it will eject the empty case. The key to running a Lebel successfully
is ... you can't be gentle with it. You have to open this bolt stiffly to ensure that you have the proper amount of force to lift the elevator. Like so. Now let's take a moment to discuss this M93 thing. Virtually every Lebel you will ever find has
been updated to the M93 improved pattern. The French army was really quite successful
at bringing all the rifles in and updating them. There are a few floating around, in fact ...
I believe that the Cody Firearms Museum actually has one in the original pattern and I
haven't had a chance to look at it very closely yet. But I suspect that's because they
basically got some sort of factory sample during a production run that got shipped over
to the US in the early 1890s and never went back. So it never had a chance to be updated,
which by the way is a fantastic resource to have, because even in France un-updated original
1886 rifles are extremely difficult to find. But I'm getting ahead of myself. There were
four primary changes that were made as part of this 1893 package. There were
a lot more changes than this, but most of them were very small tweaks. Basically
little changes to production tooling or manufacturing techniques, things that
just either fixed production problems that they discovered along the way, or that sort of element. And these are things that are very
difficult to actually notice in a rifle. There are four, however, that are distinctive and visible. And the most obvious of them is the rear sight
block. So originally this was just a soldered on rear sight block, sounds fine. However a
combination I think of the recoil and the heat that these rear sights started coming
loose, and that was a problem. So they added in these two little claws that
wrap around the barrel and hold the rear sight much more securely in place. And that's
one of the 1893 modifications. By the way, I should point out - these modifications
were all done independently and then kind of grouped together under the general
pattern of Model of 1893 improvement. So when the rifles came back to be
upgraded, all of these changes were made, where they had been actually implemented
progressively over a couple of years. The second one that we'll take a look at is the addition of a stacking rod to the nose cap of the rifle. So this is not an unmodified rifle, but it does have the original pattern of nose cap, which is pretty cool and difficult to find by itself. And really all they did was add this rod to it,
the idea was this would allow you to stack rifles so you didn't have to ... lay them down
on stuff or lay them flat on the ground. Three soldiers in bivouac could stand
their rifles up in a little tripod using those rods. So you'll find those on Berthiers as well. Perhaps the most important of the
changes was the addition of a gas vent shield. And you can see that here. This is the updated version, this is the original version. So the problem they had here was ... cartridges are ... by 1886 they understood
pretty well how to make cartridges. Brass (well first copper and then brass)
cartridges had been around for a while. However, now we're talking about a much
higher pressure with this smokeless powder, and cartridge production technology
still isn't nearly as good as it is today, and so they had problems with
cartridges splitting or rupturing. And with the original version of the rifle if
a cartridge ruptured, you could have gas that would vent straight back here,
right along this channel in the bolt and basically right into the shooters
face. And that was a safety problem. So, the solution was simply to put
a little vertical block on the bolt head that would redirect any gas. So if gas came
back out of here from a ruptured cartridge, it would come to here, hit this shield
and get basically blasted off to the sides. It still wouldn't be a good thing,
but you wouldn't be blowing ... hot propellant gas straight into a shooter's eye. There's a little bit better view of that modification. Then they did also change the style of
the cocking piece back here. So the 1886 M93, the later version, has this larger
diameter kind of just slightly concave surface where the original 1886 was
convex and a little smaller in diameter. And then lastly they changed the style,
the shape, of the magazine follower. So there's a little plunger down in the
bottom that acts as the magazine follower. Unfortunately, I don't have an
example of the early pattern to show you. I have the bolt, I have the nose cap, but I don't
have one of the early magazine followers. So that's a pretty trivial change anyway as far
as practical handling or identification goes, because you really can't see it
from the outside of the rifle at all. And it doesn't actually change how the gun works. It occurs to me I kind of skipped over the part
where I normally talk about the controls on a rifle, and well, that's because there
really aren't very many on the Lebel. As we discussed earlier, there is no manual safety. You have a trigger, Lebel triggers (in fact pretty much the triggers of everything in
... well, all French military rifles really) tend to be quite heavy and stiff. And this comes in large part from the primers that they tended to use, which were quite stiff primers. And so they tend to have very heavy firing pin springs in these guns, which translates into a heavy trigger pull. Then the only other control you have on
here is this lever, which can flip forward or back. And this is the magazine cut off. So at this
point they still wanted to to have a mechanism for loading the magazine and then keeping
it in reserve. And the cutoff on the Lebel is really quite simple, when it's forward
this loading elevator can't go down. So the magazine tube remains full and every
time you cycle the bolt, the elevator just stays up. You'll notice that ... the little lever here that
would cause the bolt to push the elevator down, when I move the lever that gets dropped
out of position, so it can't be actuated. In this position you would single load cartridges, and you'd be firing volleys on an officer's command, until such time as perhaps the officer issued the command to fire individually at will, in which case you could re-engage your magazine when you needed all the capacity. Sights on the Lebel can be used in three different ways. What you would normally expect to be the
standard, which is this configuration right here, allows you to shoot from 400 out
to 800. So you can see 5, 6, 7 and 800 yard [metre] markings, and you would
do that simply by adjusting the elevator. Or, in order to exploit the new long-range
potential of the rifle, you could stand the sight up vertically (let's tilt it forward here,
so you can see it a little better), and you can then adjust this slider
all the way up to as much as 2,400. This is going to start at 9 and go up
to 2,400. See we have our little tiny U-shaped notch rear sight there,
which matches up with a very small ... front post. This allows for good precision shooting, but they
would change this sight picture on the Berthiers during World War One for something that
was a lot more practical in actual combat. So 2,400 metres is cool, but rarely going to be used. Most of the time you would actually use this
rifle with the sight folded all the way forward. Doing this, you have a third little tiny rear
notch right there, and ... at this position the sight is zeroed for 250 metres, which
is considered the battle sight zero. Or in other words, for anything from
1 metre out to 250, you set it there, aim at the target and you'll hit
within a certain gradient high or low. So this, while it looks unusual with the sight folded forward, is actually going to be the correct position to use it in for, basically, all common applications. One last element to look at here is the bayonet, popularly known as "Rosalie", in the common parlance. This is the model of 1886 bayonet and it
does have a quillion here for bayonet fighting, but I think it was primarily intended as a
defence against cavalry. And that's both why it's so long, and why instead of
having a blade it's just a cruciform spike. You don't need a blade to try and prevent
someone on horseback from over-running you. When you have a bayonet on a rifle
you need something pointy like a spear. This effectively turns the Lebel
into about a six and a half foot long spear. The spike on this is 20.5 inches long,
this would be longer even ... once the Germans adopted the
Gewehr 98 and it's very long bladed bayonet, the Lebel with its spike would still be
longer, giving the French infantryman theoretically an advantage in
hand-to-hand combat in World War One. Whether that was actually ever relevant,
well maybe, occasionally, but not very often. During World War One there
would be some simplification of this. In 1915 they would cut off the quillion. The 1915 pattern is like this with just a flat base. They realised this bayonet fighting thing with the quillion is really kind of meaningless. We don't need to put that much extra
work into the bayonets, so they got rid of it. And they would also add a brass material handle in addition to the original aluminium. Rosalie here has a little spring-loaded tab
(the spring in this one's a little bit weak), but it pushes over and it locks ... behind this lug on the barrel. So when we mount the bayonet,
this round plug fits into this round socket on the nose cap
and then the locking lug engages behind that, right there. And then there is a second lug
right here on the barrel to help guide the bayonet. Well, the Lebel may have been declared
obsolete in 1920, but that definitely wasn't the end of the life of the Lebel in French service. In the 1920s there would be an effort to convert this
to the new 7.5mm straight walled modern cartridge. And then in the 1930s there would be an effort to
take these obsolete Lebel rifles and turn them into something that could still be used by the military.
That would result in the R35 carbines. So we'll be taking a look at both of those in upcoming videos. If you're interested in those definitely stick around. And thank you very much for watching.
If you appreciate this sort of thing on the net, please do consider checking out my Patreon page, that's
what allows me to put out this sort of content for you guys. And if you're really a big fan of the French
military and the French effort in World War One check out (it's over there), check
out the cool T-shirt design. If you want one of those you can get one of those
at the Forgotten Weapons merchandise shop. Thanks for watching. [ cc by sk cn2 ]
This guy’s videos are a serious must for anyone interested in this games’ weapons.
He has a whole playlist focussing on BF1 weapons.
Interesting guy too.
And now I know what's going on with that weird reload animation. Thankyou, Gun Jesus!